1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a system and method for measuring a heterogeneous network signal and a recording medium thereof. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for adjusting a signal measurement period of other non-active network transmission interfaces applied to a mobile communication apparatus supporting multiple transmission interfaces, according to changes in the signal strength of the active network transmission interface.
2. Related Art
Communication transmission networks constructed based on various transmission interface standards are continuously developed with coming era of mobile communication transmission. As each transmission interface has different transmission property specifications in the standard (such as coverage, data rate, and mobility), usually different applications have different transmission interfaces correspond to the requirements.
Recently, some system operators begin to construct a so-called “heterogeneous network” in order to provide better service. The “heterogeneous network” refers to a communication transmission network architecture using multiple transmission interfaces to provide high quality communication transmission service. Transmission interfaces can be switched according to the quality or the cost under this architecture to meet the user's requirements. For the operators, the “heterogeneous network” can not only provide better services for their users, but also reduce the cost of building networks.
For the user, “heterogeneous network” is that the user can not only enjoy various applications and better services by different transmission interfaces in the “heterogeneous network”, but also the user can save their cost by using the suitable transmission interface for different situation. In order to enjoy the advantages of the “heterogeneous network”, the user has to use the mobile communication apparatus supporting multiple transmission interfaces to perform communication transmission, i.e., the so-called “multi-mode” mobile communication apparatus. Recently, most of the common “multi-mode” mobile communication apparatuses provide at least one transmission interface applicable to a cellular network, for example, general packet radio service (GPRS), and at least one IP-based mobile access network, for example, wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi). In order to make sure that the “multi-mode” transmission interface in the mobile communication apparatus keeps operating normally when required, most of the transmission interface specification requires measuring the quality of the signal periodically to handle the status of each transmission interfaces.
Therefore, no matter for an active network transmission interface or a non-active network transmission interface in the mobile communication apparatus, according to the transmission interface specification, when a certain periodic time is reached, the signal measurement operation is activated. As each signal measurement involves the operation of mobile communication apparatus software/hardware, it is quite power-consuming. Especially, when the mobile communication apparatus supports more and more transmission interfaces, the periodic signal measurement of different transmission interfaces may greatly consume the power of the mobile communication apparatus. If the situation that a specific transmission interface needs to report the signal measurement result to the network server of the remote communication transmission network periodically, the standby time and talk time of the mobile communication apparatus is greatly reduced.